FATF may blacklist Pak due to ‘lobbying by India’

Lahore, April 2

Pakistan could be blacklisted by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) due to “lobbying by India”, Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said as he estimated that the country could suffer $10 billion loss annually if it remains in the watchdog’s grey list.

In June last year, the Paris-based FATF had placed Pakistan on the ‘grey list’ of countries whose domestic laws are considered weak to tackle the challenges of money laundering and terrorism financing.

The FATF is working to curb terrorism financing and money laundering and has asked Pakistan to reassess the operation of banned terrorist outfits. Pakistan is under intense international pressure to rein in terror groups like JeM after the Pulwama attack.

“The Foreign Office is calculating the annual loss if Pakistan is pushed in the black-list by the FATF as India is lobbying for this,” Qureshi said at the Governor’s House here on Monday evening.

He said the government has calculated that Pakistan will face $10 billion loss annually if it remains in the ‘grey list’.

A group of experts from the FATF recently visited Pakistan to review whether Islamabad has made progress on global standards against financial crimes to warrant its exclusion from the watchdog’s ‘grey list’.

During its three-day visit to Islamabad in the last week of March, a delegation of the Asia-Pacific Group on money laundering, a regional affiliate of the FATF, expressed serious reservations over insufficient physical actions on ground against banned groups to block flow of funds and activities. — PTI